customer
A good tour guide makes all the difference. We had a great experience.
Let me start off by saying that we were expecting this trip to be an email scam. The package price was super reasonable. In fact, there is no way one could travel to China, stay at nice hotels, eat, and travel to the areas we did without paying at least twice the price. Heck, we couldn't have even gotten flights for that cheap. So, the trip was a real bargain. When we received our Visas in the mail the week prior to our flight, we figured the trip was really going to happen. Before I get into details about the tours, let me start with the flight. Our flight, which was scheduled to be 16 hours in the air, turned into a 27 hour trip because Russia was not letting US flights over their airspace. The additional time meant an additional stop, refueling, and a fresh crew, hence the extended travel time. Although it was no fault of the tour company, we arrived just hours before the first day of tours. We landed in the wee hours of the morning and was relieved to find our driver waiting for us when we got off the plane. That was a great way of starting our trip and confirmation that having a tour package was not all bad. We were hesitant to go on the trip at first because none of us had ever taken a packaged tour before. I was envisioning a large busload of people, which sounds like a living hell to me. Our group, thankfully, was just 12 people, which was a relief, and we got along real well with everyone in our group. We even took a side trip with several of them one evening, which was a personal highlight. Our first guide was Annie. Although Annie was personable, she was very difficult to understand. She didn't have the command over the English language that we had hoped, and it appeared she was new at the job and wasn't quite ready to lead. In addition, the sound system in the bus had an echo effect that compounded the problem. Every conversation required strained attention. We were with Annie for the first two days of our trip, in Beijing, where we went to The Great Wall, which was fantastic! We wasted valuable time at the Jade Museum, one of several stops that make the trip so inexpensive. Another such stop was at a Traditional Chinese Medicine Center, where we were quickly disappointed to find that this was just another opportunity to relieve the tourists of their money. It's a shame since it could have been so much more. We expected to hear about a variety of interesting topics but instead witnessed the hard sell of herbs to improve your health. Also on the agenda was the Forbidden City and Summer Palace, which were just as crazy-overrun with tourists as Tiananmen Square, to the point of being overwhelming. We felt that our tour guide really let us down with limited information and context on those stops. I don't think our 15-year-old got a grasp of the significance from any of the tours on the first two days. We also visited a pearl factory, which provided some good information but also lasted a bit too long. Beside the lunches that were provided at the pearl factory and the jade museum, the food was uniformly delicious. When we flew to Shanghai, we had our second tour guide, John. He was fantastic! If we had had him for the entire trip, we would have rated this trip 5 stars. We could ask him anything about China and he was open to discuss anything we asked. Our group of 12 asked him all kinds of questions, and it was educational to understand world views from the China point of view. John led us for the rest of the trip, and for that we are thankful. We walked on our own on the streets of Shanghai, which is like the US version of Wall Street. We found Shanghai much more interesting than Beijing. Then we traveled to Suzhou, and later Hanghou. The Hangzhou causeway boat ride was one of the highlights of the trip. We could have toured the market there for several more hours. The silk spinning factory was interesting, though we would have liked to spend more time looking at the displays rather than shopping. We didn't care for any of the sales stops, but the bamboo clothing stop was the most interesting. Another highlight of the trip was the national park at Huangshan, which was a $149/person addition to the trip. It was worth it! What a beautiful park, even in the wind and rain. Another trip highlight. The old streets in Huangshan City were less interesting than the other, being a bit too touristy for our tastes. Overall the trip was a complete success. The success of your trip will depend a lot on your tour guide. By the end I really appreciated the benefits of being on a guided tour. We didn't need to worry about anything--no car rental, no trying to read maps, no tolls, no language barrier. A guided tour was the way to go, so I am happy we went. I think you will, too.